The Impala Chronicles: FortySome Years in a Life
by Bardicvoice
Summary: This is the story of the USA seen from a Chevrolet through the eyes of her various owners, with 1 chapter for each year of the Impala's existence from 1967 through 2011. The Winchester years are based in canon per the show and John Winchester's Journal.
1. June 12, 1967: Black and White

**Forty-Three Years in a Life, Chapter One**

**June 12, 1967: Black And White**

"Umm, honey?"

The Impala hardtop's showroom shine caught and reflected every bit of the long Milwaukee summer twilight, chrome gleaming like quicksilver on liquid black ink. Rosa had to admit it made an imposing statement in their driveway, but it wasn't quite what she'd been expecting.

"I thought you had your eye on that red Bel Air station wagon?"

Clarence slid an arm around her waist and squeezed, his eyes still fondly on the brand-new car.

"The wagon was already sold. And when I saw this one, well – wait until you see the trunk, Rosa! It's practically got a wagon's storage space. And there's enough room in the back seat that the kids won't be punching each other all the time."

"Planning a long drive?" she teased gently, and felt him stiffen. She elbowed him in the ribs, and when he looked down, startled, she smiled. "We should."

His confusion was plain.

"I thought we'd agreed we shouldn't chance it."

"That was yesterday. This is today." At his look of blatant non-comprehension, she chuckled. "You didn't have the radio on at all today, did you? You missed the headline news. We're legal, honey. In all fifty states. The Supreme Court said so. So that job with NASA in Huntsville? You should take it."

He kept on looking at her as if her words didn't make sense, his blue eyes questing for meaning in her brown ones. An open window somewhere poured the Beatles' new release _Sgt Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band_ into the summer warmth like a soundtrack for the day. She laced her dark fingers in his pale ones and spoke as earnestly as she could.

"All state laws banning interracial marriages are unconstitutional. That's what the Supreme Court said. And on the NBC news tonight, David Brinkley said White House watchers expect Johnson will nominate Thurgood Marshall to the Court tomorrow. The first black Justice on the Supreme Court – wouldn't that be something? The world is changing, Clarence. It's changing. It's the Summer of Love. And we're part of it."

He squeezed her hands and leaned against the car's solid flank, needing the support as the ground shifted beneath his feet. The news yesterday had been race riots down in Tampa, Florida. The news the day before was a cease-fire ending the Israeli/Arab Six Day War, the one he'd thought might tip the balance into a world war, not just the "action" in Viet Nam with the U.S., China, and Russia heating up the Cold War through the proxy of other, smaller countries, playing up both sides of the domino game.

And now he and his wife were legal everywhere, not just where they happened to live. Still …

"Just because our marriage is legal doesn't mean we wouldn't have problems," he warned. "Segregation is still big down south; just look at the new governor in Georgia. Alabama won't be easy for you or the kids. It won't be safe."

"No place is safe," she answered. "There were race riots in Philly last month. Heck, there could be riots here. There's no discrimination-free zone."

"The job's not certain, either," he said. "After that fire on the pad, who knows what'll happen to the Apollo program?"

"Are you determined to talk yourself out of this?" Exasperated, she shook him. "Just last month, they announced the crew for Apollo 7; no way will it not happen. We're going to the moon, and soon. That's been your dream ever since Kennedy's speech, back when you were still working on your degree; it's been _our_ dream. You'll never forgive yourself if you let this chance pass you by, and sooner or later, you'd resent us for it if you gave it up now just because you married a black woman and had colored kids! I _know_ it'll be hard, but that's _why_ we have to do it. Change is up to us. And I was wrong last night when I said no, when I said we should play it safe. I was _wrong_." She framed his face in her hands. "The NASA job is a once in a lifetime opportunity. We should take it. We should make history."

The unseen radio cut from the Beatles to the Doors' _Light My Fire_, and Clarence finally smiled.

"Sounds like fate agrees with you. I guess we'll build rocket engines." He swept her up into his arms and kissed her soundly, the heady taste of promise and danger on her lips, and fiercely hoped he was doing the right thing. When he set her back down to lean against the car, he felt the euphoria of risk still running through his veins, and grinned.

"Black really is my favorite color."

* * *

_Author Note: Couldn't resist setting this in Milwaukee in June and including the red 1967 Chevy Bel Air station wagon that my Dad bought that summer. The landmark Supreme Court case on interracial marriage was __Loving v. Virginia__. And Rosa was right; no place was safe. There were race riots in Milwaukee from July 30 through August 2, and the city was totally shut down from August 1-10 to get the violence under control. People forget how recent the civil rights movement really was …_


	2. Nov 20, 1968: Cursed

**Forty-Three Years in a Life, Chapter 2**

**November 20, 1968 – Cursed**

Twice that year, he nearly ran the Impala off the road.

The problem was listening to the radio while driving. That was pretty much his only time to listen to the news, given the irregularity of his hours, because everything hinged on launch and mission times and follow-up. Rosa could always watch Huntley-Brinkley with the kids, but in every run-up to a launch Clarence lost any semblance of a normal schedule. And when there were problems, things just got worse.

The April 4 launch of Apollo 6, the last unmanned qualification flight of the Saturn V moon rocket, hadn't gone as planned. The early post-mortem on the pogo oscillations and second and third-stage engine failures meant he was late driving home and was just minutes out of the Marshall parking lot when the DJ interrupted Johnny Cash's _Folsom Prison Blues_ to broadcast Robert Kennedy's speech announcing the assassination of Martin Luther King. Like a bad sequel, he was in the car again on the very same stretch of road two months later on June 5 in the obscenely early morning to hear the news that Kennedy himself had been shot.

The insistent pulse of Iron Butterfly's _In A Gadda Da Vida_ started up on the radio, the relentless beat a reminder that every month had brought more news feeding that same grief, disbelief, and anger. The Glenville Shootout race riot in Cleveland in July. The violence flaring around anti-war protests at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago in August. Hell, even the Warsaw Pact troops invading Czechoslovakia and crushing the Prague Spring, the news of Hussein's coup in Iran, and then the report of U.S. bombing in Laos just days after Johnson's Halloween announcement that the artillery bombardment of North Viet Nam had stopped because of progress at the Paris peace talks. Some peace. He'd heard about all of them in the car on that road.

It was almost enough to make him think the road was cursed.

He pulled his mind out of the melancholy gutter by main force. The launch preparations for Apollo 8 were going perfectly, and since the first manned Saturn V mission had been changed from just an Earth orbit – a rerun of Apollo 7, but with his launch vehicle – to the first ever circumlunar one, spirits had bounced high despite the added pressure of the amped-up schedule that had him driving in to work in the predawn darkness of 6:00 AM. All the kids – Alice as well as the boys – were starting to play astronaut. And the twins' birthday party today promised to be a resounding success because of his personal mission triumph yesterday. Those new little "Hot Wheels" cars were all the rage and hard to find, but he'd gotten lucky enough to get two for each of them. He wasn't fool enough to think balance would be enough to ensure domestic peace, but he was confident that it would make the party itself a happy one, even if none of the little model cars were Impalas.

Like his thoughts, the radio shifted gears, this time to the gentle autumn melancholy of Simon and Garfunkel's _Bookends_. He sang along half under his breath, the song suiting his mixed mood. _Time it was, and what was a time it was, it was a time of innocence, a time of confidences. Long ago it must be, I have a photograph: preserve your memories, they're all that's left you._ He hoped and prayed he'd have more than that.

"We have breaking news out of West Virginia." The DJ's voice broke the peace after the song with foreboding, and Clarence's fingers clenched on the steering wheel. "At about 5:30 this morning, there was a massive explosion in the Consolidation Coal mine near Farmington. The blast was felt over twelve miles away and the mine is on fire, with flames reported to reach 150 feet in the air. Reports are still confused, but authorities say there were 99 men in the mine at the time of the blast, and most of them are apparently trapped. We'll keep you updated as new information comes in, but all indications are this may be the worst mine disaster in West Virginia since the Monongah explosion in 1907."

He turned off the radio and listened instead to the rumble of the tires on the asphalt. He had to find a different way to and from work. This road just had to be cursed.

* * *

_Author's Note: I remember 1968 as a really hard year, with a lot more bad news than good. I think that's partially why Apollo 8 had such a profound impact not just on me, but on many others, when for the first time on Christmas Eve we saw the Earth rise over the lunar landscape and heard the astronauts reciting the first ten verses of the Book of Genesis from the King James Version of the Bible. It was a gift of hope at the end of a year that had precious little of it._


	3. July 20, 1969: Moon Magic

**Forty-Three Years in a Life, Chapter 3**

**July 20, 1969: Moon Magic**

"Dad, tell them to stop! They're being brats again!"

One quick glance in the Impala's rearview mirror showed that nine-year-old Alice, stuck in the middle of the back seat between the twins, was ineffectually battling their attempts to poke each other around her. If it wasn't one thing, it was another. He caught Rosa's raised eyebrow from the passenger seat, the look that said, _they're your sons_, and sighed. He turned down the volume on the radio, Creedence Clearwater Revival's _Bad Moon Rising_, and raised his voice.

"Frank! Tony! Knock it off. We're almost at the beach, but if you two don't can it, we'll turn right around. I mean it!" He always thought it wasn't so much the threat as the tone of voice. They were good kids, but, well, seven years old and boys; that pretty much said it all. He waited for the usual _he started it_ whine, but it didn't come; instead, the view out the window caught Frank's eye, and he almost hit Alice in the nose as he bounced, pointed, and squealed.

"Look, look! Is it _real_?"

The entire roof of the square little roadside diner was hidden beneath a gigantic fiberglass crab, painted in lifelike colors. Galveston boasted about its seafood, but this was really taking it to extremes. Still, it provided a perfect opportunity.

"They get that size eating rowdy little boys," he said, and teased in time with the song, "Are you prepared to die?" That earned him an eyeroll and a shake of the head from Rosa.

"You're incorrigible." But she was smiling.

He was smiling a lot himself. They hadn't had a vacation in a long time. The pressure to meet Kennedy's deadline of a man on the moon by the end of the decade meant that everyone had their noses to the grindstone, and the inexorable march of time brought that deadline scary close. Four missions planned to launch in a single year made for a lot of pressure and demand. It felt wrong even now, being away during the keystone mission, but he'd done his part. A flawless launch meant the launch team had some downtime while the pressure was on at Mission Control in Houston, so this was the perfect opportunity for a road trip. Rosa had packed the trunk on launch day, betting things would go off without a hitch, and they'd hit the road for Texas long before dawn the next morning. The end of the trip would be Houston, with fingers crossed that there would be a party to welcome the astronauts home, even though they'd be in the mobile quarantine facility and unable to join in the festivities.

In the meantime, however, there was Galveston beach, and maybe some time on the sand in the sun with waves rolling in – emphatically not crashing – and raucous seagulls screeching would finally get Rosa and the kids to stop singing that Glen Campbell song. The radio started Elvis's _In The Ghetto_ just as they pulled in to the parking lot at the public beach, and he clicked it off quickly. No downers today. No ghetto songs, no Chappaquiddick news, no more word of the Weatherman faction taking control of the Students for a Democratic Society or reports of more gay rights riots like Stonewall. Just happy things.

All four doors popped open and they bailed out of the car in a riot of laughter, towels, beach blankets, toys, and a cooler. Wooden steps led from the parking lot down to the beach, and he paused on the steps. There were fewer people on the beach than he'd expected and the beach itself looked odd, pockmarked with hundreds of little holes like the myriad tiny craters on the moon. The holes were everywhere; they even covered a few when he and Rosa spread their blanket.

"What was that?"

Alice had gone stock-still, staring at the sand about twenty feet away, and they all turned to look. At first, he saw nothing; then a scuttling motion in the sand revealed a small crab only an inch or so long hustling across the sand and darting down a hole. Scanning across the beach, he caught more of those small flurries, quick furtive forays of crabs from hole to hole, and he chuckled.

"They're crabs, honey. Just little crabs."

"But where did it go?"

"Down a hole."

"Yeah, like the one you're standing on," Tony pointed out helpfully, and Alice jumped aside with a shriek, only to land on yet another hole and shriek again.

"Eeeew! Eeeew! Mom, they're everywhere!"

"They won't hurt you, sweetie. They're a lot more scared of us than you are of them." Rosa's attempt at reassurance fell flat when another crab gave her the lie by scuttling across the edge of the blanket and down another hole, and Alice shrieked again and stamped her sandaled foot.

"I hate this place! I want to go back to the motel, where there's a pool and the water's clean and there aren't _things_ running over you!"

"Maybe there's a really big one, like the one on that building," Frank chimed in. "D'you think we'll see a big one, Dad?"

"They don't really get that big," he said, but knew it was a lost cause as Tony, behind Alice, picked up the theme.

"Yeah, a _really_ big one! An' it'll come an' pinch your toes right off, and then your ankle and your leg!" He suited actions to words by pinching her while he spoke, and she swatted him.

"Stop it! You're nasty!"

"An' you're scared! Allie is a scaredy-cat! Allie is a scaredy-cat!"

"I'm not scared! But I don't like it here, and I'm not staying!" With that, she flounced off back toward the parking lot, trailing her beach towel and jumping over every hole in her way until she bolted up the stairs and took refuge with the car, sitting on the rear bumper and knuckling away angry, embarrassed tears. Clarence and Rosa exchanged a speaking glance, and then she rolled her eyes heavenward and started picking up the blanket. He corralled the boys.

"Don't you be mean to your sister, boys. That's not nice."

"But why can't we stay?" Frank complained. "Just because Alice is such a _girl_." He laced the word with seven-year-old scorn and toed the sand. "We could catch 'em. It'd be _fun_."

"It wouldn't be much fun for the crabs," Rosa said. "That's probably why there aren't more people on this stretch of beach. I see more people further down," she added to Clarence, pointing her free elbow off to the right and nodding. "Maybe we'll try again there tomorrow, see if it's better."

"Worth a try," he agreed, and collected the last of the stuff. "C'mon, guys; back to the car. We'll hang out at the pool, and then what do you say we watch the moon landing? It won't be long now; just a few more hours."

There was still magic in the moon; that prospect diverted them very handily from the crabs.

"Can we stay up and watch while they walk around, too?" Tony wheedled.

"It's going to be late," he warned as he chivvied them back to the car. "They're supposed to go to sleep for a while after they land, 'cause they'll have been up for a long time. You might fall asleep, too."

"I won't!" Frank said staunchly.

"Me neither!" Tony agreed.

But in the end, it was Alice who stayed awake the whole time. They'd all watched the landing – Rosa took his hand and squeezed when he started muttering about it taking too long, fretting about the fuel running out – and the walk had happened sooner than he'd thought, since Armstrong and Aldrin skipped the sleep period out of wired eagerness. Even so, the twins were long asleep by the time the grainy, ghostly black and white picture showed Armstrong hopping awkwardly down the LM ladder. For the whole two and a half hours of the moon walk, Alice sat on the floor in front of the room's small set, utterly rapt in the snowy, indistinct images. Sitting next to him on the edge of the bed, Rosa bit her lip, shook her head, and cried silent tears of wonder and joy, and what he felt, words couldn't express.

In the small hours of the morning while their children and the astronauts slept, he and Rosa, by silent mutual agreement, eased out of the motel room and sat on the Impala's trunk, looking up at the sky. They weren't the only ones outside, looking at the sky; not far away, another couple swayed in each others' arms as John Lennon's _Give Peace a Chance_ floated softly from their car radio. The waxing crescent moon wasn't visible any more – it had set just before midnight – but even so, he could see it in his mind's eye. He knew he would always be able to see it, just the way it had been that night, but that he'd never see it the same way again.

"We did it, Rosa," he whispered. "We made it. There are men on the moon, right up there, right now. We've walked on another world. Nothing will ever be the same."

"Some things will," she said, and took his hand. Something about the tone of her voice caught him, and he looked at her to see her smile. "Some things will be more of the same."

"What do you mean?" he asked, but she just shook her head, still smiling.

"You remember that station wagon you wanted? Back when you bought the Impala?" He vaguely remembered a flash of red, and nodded. "You really should have tried harder and gotten it."

"I don't understand," he said, bewildered. "I thought you loved the Impala."

"I do. Don't get me wrong. And I'll miss her. But – she doesn't have enough space."

He looked at her, uncomprehending, and then the realization washed over him as she said, "We're really going to need that third seat."

"That wagon didn't have one," he said stupidly, and then his tongue and his body finally caught up to his brain and he slid off the car and took her in his arms. "Really? You're – pregnant?"

"Really," she agreed, with just a hint of dryness betraying her amusement at his stupefaction, and all the joy just overflowed. He scooped her up and whirled her around, and then set her back down on the Impala's trunk with exaggerated care.

"When?" he asked, and she chuckled.

"You don't have to sell the Impala just yet. By next February, though, we're going to need a wagon with a third seat. Or a VW bus."

"We'll have to tell the kids," he realized, and she put a finger across his lips.

"After this trip," she said and patted the car, then rested her hand on her flat stomach. "Let's just enjoy it together. All of us."

* * *

_Author's Note: I'd have loved to take the Impala to Woodstock and to have commemorated the release of Led Zeppelin I, but the moon landing dominated this year for me. And I wish I could have countered the boys' dismissive disdain for "girls" by pointing out that Golda Meir had become the prime minister of Israel, but kids really wouldn't have cared. The holes and crabs on Galveston beach and the monster crab on the diner's roof, by the way, come straight from my own childhood memory of a visit to that beach; we rapidly abandoned the beach and hung out instead at the motel's nice clean pool!_


	4. Aug 27, 1970: Culture Clash

**

* * *

**

Forty-Three Years in a Life, Chapter 4

**August 27, 1970: Culture Clash**

"War! Ugh, good God, y'all – what is it good for? Absolutely nothing!" Palms drumming on the Impala's steering wheel, Stuart belted out the lyrics along with Edwin Starr as he passed Bert's Barber Shop and angled the car into a spot not too far down the block from Jay Bird's Diner. Since his car windows were wide open in the summer heat, he got more than a few looks from passersby, but he didn't care who knew his opinions on the war. He leaned across the long seat and rolled up the windows before getting out of the car.

On the map of the usual tensions between town and gown in every college town across the country, Jay Bird's Diner was neutral territory. Even though classes weren't in session yet, he hadn't been in Lawrence for a week before figuring that out, along with which joints catered to students and which ones were just asking for trouble. Scoping that out was simple survival in the wake of Ohio State, the Hard Hat riot in New York, and Jackson State University in Mississippi. College kids had _died_ in anti-war protests that spring; only a fool wouldn't pay attention. And whatever his parents thought, Stu wasn't a fool. Hey, he'd settled for the secondhand Impala when what he really wanted was the new Pontiac TransAm; he understood what he (and they) could afford.

Jay Bird's hired both college students and the local high school ones, mixing the townies and the college kids without regard for background. The diner was affirmative action dispensing with segregation between the college and the town and succeeded where others failed; after all, everyone needed chocolate shakes. Not to mention burgers and coffee.

He banged through the door, and heard the Beatle's _The Long and Winding Road_ playing in the background. The diner featured a gentler playlist than the rock station he favored in the car: no Black Sabbath, no Zeppelin, no Grateful Dead, but at least he'd heard Free's _It's Alright Now_ once during lunch while he'd been hunting for housing. (He was unspeakably grateful he wasn't a freshman and expected to live in campus housing …) He suspected the diner's owners of being more into Simon and Garfunkel and the Carpenters, but he had no objections to the former and could live with some of the latter, although the saccharin level sometimes gave him spiritual tooth-rot.

He grabbed a stool at the counter next to a black-haired kid nursing a chocolate shake, and ordered a burger, fries, and a Coke without bothering to look at the menu. An earlier diner had left his newspaper behind; Stu flipped through the pages, and snorted when he hit the op-ed page. The kid next to him glanced at him curiously with a raised eyebrow, and he tapped the paper in explanation.

"This is bogus," he said. "Some dude is grumbling that rock festivals are corrupting today's youth; he says the Isle of Wight Festival concert is just the latest, along with Woodstock, Monterey, and Altamont, to extol drugs and make light of war. We're not making light of the war, man – just the opposite. We're _protesting_ the war – and that's deadly serious."

The kid just looked at him for a minute, and then shook his head.

"Doesn't really matter to you, does it? You're not going."

The scornful dismissal in the kid's voice cut deeper than he thought it would, and he flared up in automatic defense.

"What do you mean, kid?"

The kid's blue-grey eyes were dead level.

"I mean, you've got a student deferment, right? So you're not going to 'Nam, are you?"

"So?"

"So the whole protest thing falls kinda flat. You've found a way around having to put your own life on the line; you're not going to be called up. So protesting about those of us who are and calling us bad names is kinda, well, a cop-out."

He looked more closely at the kid. He was probably sixteen, maybe seventeen, but seemed both younger and older: younger in his innocence, but older in his eyes. Encouraged by Stu's silence, he kept talking.

"A lot of us can't afford college. But we're not going to dodge, either. My Dad was a Marine in World War II; I figure, when I turn 17 next year, I'm going to enlist and be a Marine, like my Dad. Beats waiting to get drafted and winding up in the Army, anyway."

"That argument sounds like you're just picking the lesser of two evils."

"So? At least I'm picking, and not running."

That cut to the quick.

"I'm not running. I'm going to school; there's a difference."

The kid sucked noisily on the straw at the bottom of his drink, chasing down the last of the chocolate and ice cream, and then pushed the empty, fluted glass away.

"Couldn't prove it by me," he said, and dropped two bills on the counter, nodding at the counter man. "Thanks, Dave." He slid off the stool and looked thoughtfully at Stu before heading for the door. "Do you really believe the war is wrong, or do you just don't want to go?" he asked, and then was out the door before Stuart could respond.

His burger and fries landed in front of him, and Stu found himself just looking at them instead of digging in. What the kid had said hurt in unexpected ways. He really believed the war was wrong – just look at the whole My Lai thing, for one – but he also remembered having had to register for the Selective Service, and seeing his number come up in the draft lottery last year He'd been scared spitless, and then pathetically relieved when he'd been accepted at the university, meaning that he could submit the deferment papers letting him off the hook until he'd completed his four-year degree or turned 24, whichever came first. Transferring for his sophomore year from Alabama to the prestigious sociology department at Kansas, the very home of sociology, he hadn't even thought about the deferment – he'd been more caught up in being able to justify getting his very own car, and making it that black Impala – but it was still there.

And now, finally, prompted by that black-haired kid, he wondered: how much of his opposition to the war really was on moral grounds, and how much on his own fear?

* * *

_Author's Note: To me, 1970 was the anti-Vietnam War protest movement. I remember kids I went to high school with – although they were in classes ahead of me, since I was born in 1956 – who wound up drafted, and some of them didn't come back. For me personally, the biggest thing that year was Apollo 13, and the memory of a lunar mission that almost didn't come back, but Apollo wouldn't have mattered that much to Stu.__ The second thing to stir my aeronautically inclined soul was the first flight of the Concorde, but again, not something relevant to Stu._

_And if you think you recognize that black-haired, 16-year-old kid in Jay Bird's Diner (and for those of you who don't know, Jay Bird's is a tribute to the Jayhawks, the University of Kansas athletic teams) – you're right. I didn't expect John Winchester to turn up quite so early or quite so young in these stories, but I guess that just goes to show that even writers can get surprised by the stories they tell!_


	5. Apr 22 to 24, 1971: Blowin' in the Wind

**Forty-Three Years in a Life, Chapter 5**

**April 22-24, 1971: Blowin' In The Wind**

It was a long drive, but the Impala ate highway effortlessly. In the back seat, Sharon and Tom speeded up the miles by leading them in singing peace and protest songs; Tom had room enough to play his guitar, since Vicky had chickened out at the last minute and decided to stay for exams. But Nancy sat next to him and sang along, and the sense that they were doing something necessary and right overcame the anxiety about what would happen next.

The more he thought about it, the more important protesting seemed. It mattered so much more than just going to classes. Last September, he'd driven the Impala to the rally at Valley Forge, Pennsylvania, and saw Jane Fonda and David Sutherland, and even a 'Nam vet named John Kerry, all of them talking about why the war was wrong and had to stop. He'd missed a bunch of classes, but it hadn't seemed to matter at the time. Nixon's October promise that the U.S. would pull out another 40,000 troops before Christmas was only a partial answer. Nature had taken a hand with a massive monsoon that dumped so much rain on the country that the war ground to a halt for days, but once the ground started to dry out, the killing started up again. Nixon made a big thing about handing things over to the South Vietnamese, and touted that as a success in the news stories on November 5 that only 24 more American soldiers had died that week, the lowest number in five years, and then the following week, on November 10, when for the first time in the whole war, a week passed with no American casualties reported.

But they never had reported on the _Vietnamese_ casualties, so that didn't really matter.

The wrongness of the war made the headlines in November with the start of the trial of Lieutenant Calley for the My Lai massacre of 22 Vietnamese civilians. It took until the end of March, but at least he was convicted and sentenced to life in prison. The trial brought out all the divisions in the community, though, and even Jay Bird's saw a few fights between students and some local vets, who always argued that the lines weren't as clear as Stuart knew they had to be. Even the entertainment world reflected the split that he saw in the town; when that new comedy _All In The Family_ premiered in January, he thought he was watching the social macrocosm played out on screen in that little TV family. The sad thing was that the Archie Bunkers of Lawrence never seemed to get that the commentary – and the joke – was really on them, not on the "meathead" who represented the students' views.

The February invasion of Laos had heated up the protest movement again. Stu had become an organizer for the student body in Lawrence, and since he had a big car, also became their liaison with groups on other campuses. He did a lot of driving, loading the trunk with pamphlets and supplies, going from rally to rally all over the Midwest and even down into the South. He'd met Nancy at a little rally right in Lawrence in November and they'd started dating; from that moment, he had a companion on a lot of those drives. Since he always had room to haul both papers and people, it almost seemed the Impala turned into the principal vehicle for the anti-war movement in Kansas. His grades slipped as he cut more and more classes to keep abreast of the protest movement's needs, and his parents sent worried letters.

But this was the big one: a march on Washington, DC. Take the word right to the politicians; surround the White House and Congress so they'd have to see that they were being watched, and make a noise for peace so loud they'd have to hear. Along the way, they crashed at safe houses set up by students and other anti-war sympathizers, sleeping on couches and floors, eating pizza and potluck. They never had to wonder about their next meal; there was always someone who wished they could go and offered food and shelter as a way to be involved.

Close in to Washington, the traffic got crazy. He'd studied the maps and gotten advice from people who'd been at other rallies, but it was still a challenge. The cops diverted traffic away from the Mall, but he eventually managed to squeeze the Impala into a tight spot on D Street. They joined the milling throng that eventually sorted itself out, marching east on Constitution Avenue, curling around through Lafayette Park to come close to the White House, and then thronging near the steps of the Capitol. The organizers kept chanting, "What do you want?" and he shouted "Peace!" right along with everybody else, followed by "When do you want it?" and the answer, "Now!" By the afternoon, he was tired and hoarse, but buoyed up by the power of the group. He'd never seen so many people. The Mall was crammed almost solid, with people climbing on the statues in the fountains and into the few trees on the sides in order to get a better view. They had microphones set up on the Capitol steps for music and speeches, and everybody sang along with John Denver and Peter, Paul, and Mary. When PP&M prefaced _Blowin' in the Wind_ by saying they'd first sung it at a civil rights demonstration for Martin Luther King in 1963, Stu felt the weight of history descend, along with the urgency that things had to change now, so they wouldn't need to be singing it again. The whole crowd joined in singing _Give Peace a Chance_; half a million voices raised to the skies, calling out to Nixon, to Congress, singing to the vets, singing for the casualties, begging for peace.

Staggering wearily back to the car at the end of it all, he felt an indescribable mix of heady power and exhausted futility. Nancy snuggled close under his arm, and he hugged her gratefully.

"Was it worth it?" she asked, and he squeezed her shoulders.

"Every minute," he said, and meant it. She went quiet for a while as they got back into the car and joined the slow queue of traffic trying to escape the overcrowded city. In the back seat, Tom and Sharon fell asleep leaning on each other, the guitar silent across Tom's knees. Stu turned on the radio and nodded approval to hear Janis Joplin's cover of Kristofferson's _Me and Bobby McGee_, but kept it soft, not wanting to disturb them.

"You missed a lot of finals to make this trip," Nancy said, finally voicing her concern. "What happens if – what happens if you can't make them up, and you lose your scholarship?"

And that was the 800-pound gorilla in the car, the specter that haunted his convictions. His draft deferment lasted as long as he was in school pursuing a four-year degree; he'd only be in school as long as the scholarship money held out, because there was no way he or his parents would be able to pay for it outright. In a stupid double-bind, even though they couldn't pay for his board and tuition on top of their mortgage, his folks still made too much for him to qualify for financial aid. His advisor had already been on him about the drop in his grades; missing the finals might just be the straw that broke the camel's back and ended his deferment.

"I don't know," he admitted. "I just – this just seems more important, you know?"

"Will you go to Canada?"

Crossing the border into Canada had become the most popular tactic for draft dodgers. Canada wouldn't deport draft-age young men who took refuge there, but the big problem was, they could never come back; the U.S. made a point of announcing that draft dodgers who returned to the U.S. would be arrested, tried, and go to prison, and they'd made examples of a few who'd tried. He couldn't see himself doing that, no matter his objection to the war; the mere thought brought back the echo of that black-haired kid who'd said that at least he wasn't running. For him, at least, Canada would be running.

"No," he said at last. "I guess – if I lose the deferment, I'll go. I just – I'll try not to kill anyone. But I can't run away from the things that vets like Kerry faced. I won't let my Dad or anyone call me a coward."

"It wouldn't be cowardice to claim conscientious objector status," she said, but he shook his head.

"I don't think I could do prison, Nance. And after all I've said … how could I look myself in the mirror if I didn't take the same chance as everyone else with a draft card?" He shook his head, then smiled at her. "Besides, we'll push the drive back home. Maybe I'll be able to make up the tests, and all this will be moot."

They finally got across the river and onto the freeway, and traffic started moving. He fed the gas, and the Impala bulled forward, heading north and west, back to Lawrence.

* * *

_Author's Note: The April 24, 1971 march on Washington attracted 500,000 people, one of the biggest demonstrations to date. You can find some footage of it up on the web, including the performance by Peter, Paul & Mary, who were joined on stage by John Denver. __The "Vietnamization" program to put the South Vietnamese military in charge of their own defense did allow for the drawdown of U.S. troops, decreasing the number of American soldiers in country to 196,700 by the end of October (the lowest number since 1966), but the draft still continued and U.S. forces still experienced significant losses. Vietnam vets were usually met with insults and scorn by protesters, who didn't distinguish between the soldiers and the political administration; in that one respect, things have improved since 'Nam. Calley, by the way, was eventually pardoned and released from prison._

_For me personally, 1971 was the year of Apollo 14 and 15, which no one remembers despite 15 being the first mission with a lunar rover, a motorized riding vehicle on the Moon. The television networks were already cutting back on coverage, which had been extensive on Apollo 13 only because of the problem that nearly became a tragedy. I was acutely aware whenever we had a mission up, and couldn't understand how and why space travel had seemed to become so extraordinarily blasé for everyone else._


	6. Dec 26, 1972: Paint It Black

**Forty-Three Years in a Life, Chapter 6**

**December 26, 1972: Paint It Black**

"Sixty-seven Impala, hey? Nice solid car, that one. Big." The bluff salesman at Rainbow Motors gave the car the once-over, glancing at the odometer, the seats, and the paint, and popping the hood to see the engine. "Why are you selling?"

The woman who'd driven the car onto the lot seemed almost brittle, holding herself with care as if a quick move might shatter her. She was a middle-aged brunette and nicely dressed, although her coat wasn't quite warm enough for the Kansas winter, and the lines in her face belonged to someone who smiled often. She wasn't smiling at all now.

"I don't need it," she said brusquely. "I'm flying home in a few days."

"Well, you know, there's not that much market for these big ones now, what with gas prices going up. And this one's got some miles on it ..."

She raised her hand to stop him before his spiel really got going.

"Don't bother with the explanations to justify a ridiculously low price. I don't need it, I want to sell it, but I expect a fair price for it. If you're not serious, tell me now, and I'll take it to Tomlinson's."

He hadn't pegged her for a local, so her quick reference to the dealership across town took him by surprise. He covered quickly.

"Now, now, don't be hasty! I'm sure we can come to some arrangement. Why don't you come into the office while Harry checks it over? Have some coffee, warm up a bit?"

She let herself be ushered into the small office. From the radio on the desk, the Eagles' _Peaceful Easy Feeling_ segued perversely into an announcer rattling off the news: the death of former President Harry Truman, domestic and international protests about the Christmas Day bombing of North Vietnam, an update that the earthquake in Nicaragua three days earlier had killed over 5,000 people, more questions about the future of the Olympics after the murder of the eleven Israeli athletes at the Summer Games in Munich in September, the forecast of more cold weather with the possibility of snow.

"Now, do you have the car's title and registration papers?" Wordlessly, she handed over an envelope that yielded three pieces of paper: the car's Alabama title document and its Kansas registration card, and a letter from a county court in Alabama. He looked at the standard documents first, and raised an eyebrow at her.

"The car is in the name of a Stuart Weissman?"

"He was my son." Her voice was absolutely flat. "The probate court document establishes transfer of title on all Stuart's things to his father and me."

That explained the brittleness.

"My condolences on your loss, Mrs. Weissman. He was a student here?"

There were cracks beginning to form in her composure; her body lost some of its rigidity, as if the heat of the room had softened her.

"Until he was drafted," she said. "He left his things here with friends. He planned to come back after his tour, finish his degree …" She bit off the rest of what she might have said, and he saw her biting her lip to contain the suspicion of moisture in the corners of her eyes. She reasserted her control by main force of will and lifted her chin to look him in the eye. "Most of his things we gave away, but I need to sell his car. There's no place for it back home."

"My own boy was at Da Nang," the salesman said, quiet and steady, and all his bluster and easy bonhomie were abruptly gone. "He made it home okay last year, thank God. I really am sorry about your boy, Mrs. Weissman. We'll take care of you, I promise. No sharp dealing." He stood up, aware that her lip was trembling, but he didn't acknowledge it as he headed for the door, giving her privacy to regain her composure. "I'll just go check with Harry on how his inspection of the car is coming, but I'm sure there won't be any issues; your boy and his friends obviously took good care of it. You just wait right here, and I'll be back."

He stepped out and shut the door, and then just stood for a minute with his back against it. Through the thin wood, he heard the radio switch to old Stones – _I see a red door and I want to paint it black_ – and he closed his eyes.

The White House had made a big deal at the end of November about how they wouldn't make any more public announcements about U.S. troop withdrawals from Vietnam because the force in country was down to just 27,000.

_Twenty-six thousand, nine hundred and ninety-nine,_ he thought. _Thank you, God, for my Andy._

That big black Impala would be a reminder of what he had to be thankful for as long as it stayed on the lot. Remembering the year of fear with his boy overseas, he hoped they'd sell it soon.

* * *

_Author's Note: As much as the Vietnam War drove people apart, it also brought them together. I see it every time I visit the Wall – the Vietnam War Memorial, carved with the names of all the dead – in D.C._

_For me, 1972 was a melancholy year, because it marked the end of the moon missions with Apollo 17's splashdown on December 19, 1972. Gene Cernan and Harrison Schmitt still remain the last humans to have walked on another world. Gene, I think, was also the only one ever to swing a golf club off the planet (to this day I love his sense of humor!), and Harrison was the only bona fide geologist to take the ultimate rockhound's trip. The rest of the Apollo launch vehicles were used up on Apollo-Soyuz and on missions to the very short-lived Skylab, but all human travel has been restricted to Earth orbital missions since Apollo 17 came home; only our robots have gone further._


	7. Nov 22, 1973: Dark Side of the Moon

**Forty-Three Years in a Life, Chapter 7**

**November 22, 1973: The Dark Side of the Moon**

It was the best and worst year of his life, and he couldn't even remember it all.

The best was easy: Mary. After his two tours in 'Nam, the war ended for the U.S. with the signing of the Paris Peace Accords, and he mustered out of the Marines in February to find Mary still waiting, still loving, still amazingly wanting him. Her dad hadn't been any too pleased, but Mary had been confident he'd come around. Her mom had seemed to like him well enough, and his own folks were just pleased as punch with her. He'd started making plans with the two of them in mind, taking a job with his dad at the garage, going on the lookout for a little place that wouldn't be too expensive for a young couple just starting out, buying a car their new little family could grow into – although he'd departed from the plan a little there, seduced by the Impala instead of buying the VW bus Mary had favored.

The worst was the part in May he couldn't remember, the part that ended with Mary's dad and mom both dead, bizarrely murdered, and with cops frustrated by answers they couldn't find. He remembered Mary calling him that night, upset and wanting to leave. He remembered picking her up in the Impala and driving to the riverside, to the peaceful place near the trestle bridge where he'd planned to propose to her with the words he'd rehearsed in his mind for days. He remembered botching it in his nervousness, but at least remembering to open the ring box and say that he'd always love her for exactly who she was, and he remembered her eyes shining as she leaned towards him, and then … and then everything got strange. He _thought_ he remembered her dad yanking open the car door and yelling at her, and he _thought_ he remembered scrambling after them and protesting … and then, somehow, he was lying on the road in her arms and her dad was dead on the ground next to them, stabbed in the gut, all of them lit by the headlights of a Pinto abandoned with its engine running across the lane from them. His neck ached like the whiplash he'd gotten that time Harry Dunn had rear-ended his uncle's pickup, but he couldn't _remember_; couldn't remember the Pinto showing up, couldn't remember the guy Mary said had attacked them, couldn't remember her dad being hurt, couldn't remember doing – whatever it was – that she said made the guy run off even as whatever the guy had done to him made him pass out.

And if that wasn't bad enough, after he'd hiked to the edge of the park and found a pay phone to call the cops, they found Mary's mom dead in her house, beaten up and with her neck snapped like a twig. The neighbors remembered seeing the Pinto outside the house, and the car turned out to have been stolen. Blood on the living room floor seemed to mark where her dad had been stabbed. With no other information to go on, the cops figured it was some kind of home invasion, maybe someone with a grudge against Samuel Campbell, who'd killed Deanna, wounded Samuel and taken him hostage, and then gone after Mary, only to be run off by John and Samuel.

It wasn't a satisfying story, but it explained the Pinto, and Samuel being dead on the road when he obviously wasn't stabbed there. It didn't explain how there was no blood in the Pinto, or why someone would have gone after the Campbells in the first place, and it certainly didn't explain how he woke up with a sore neck in Mary's arms with memories of her dad's anger and no memories of any violent stranger. But Mary had needed comfort, not questions, and he, like the cops, had settled for the story that explained at least most of the facts.

The rest of the year had passed in a blur. The police investigation dragged on with no results: the guy in the Pinto might as well have been a ghost, for all the trail he left behind. Mary said she'd never seen him before and didn't know any reason why he might have wanted to harm her family, and the cops couldn't find anything, either. Oh, they found that Samuel Campbell had a lot more weapons around the house than anyone might have considered normal, but he'd always been known to be a collector and a bit of a history buff, so that wasn't particularly strange.

One of Mary's uncles was named executor of her parents' estate, and the paperwork and details were endless even though she was the only heir. Burial arrangements – well, cremation, which was a little odd, but not outlandish – straightening out finances, cleaning out the house; it was a hard time for Mary, and her pain made it hard for him. It sometimes seemed that she blamed herself for surviving when they were gone. She couldn't bear the thought of living in the house, not after what had happened there, so her uncle hired a realtor and sold it. She rented an apartment, refusing to move in with him or his parents or any of her relatives, saying she needed the time alone. He didn't understand that, but then again, he didn't understand a lot.

It was an off-kilter year all around. Nothing was normal in the country. The whole Watergate scandal thing just got bigger and bigger as the year progressed. Vice President Agnew resigned and was convicted of tax evasion. Nixon tried to block the Watergate investigation, and the worse it got, the more it seemed – however incredible it was! – that the President would be _impeached_. That just didn't happen. Oh, yeah, once in history, but that had been over a hundred years ago. A couple days ago, he'd seen Nixon saying vehemently that he was not a crook. He didn't know what to believe any more.

Even the world was screwed. Well, the Middle East always had been, but the Yom Kippur War was the worst he could remember, almost a non-stop month of fighting. The resulting Arab oil embargo almost had him regretting buying the Impala instead of something smaller and lighter as gas lines started to form and the price of gas went up and up, until people started wondering if it might even go over a dollar someday.

He took solace where he could find it. He was making pretty good money at the garage and saving every bit of it he could. In his spare time, he made the Impala better than new. He even finagled a newfangled cassette tape deck to install in her console along with the radio. And he finally had a plan to get Mary out of her funk.

He had Pink Floyd playing in the deck as he picked her up, a very deliberate choice on a mix tape of his own making. _Breathe, breathe in the air./ Don't be afraid to care. / Leave but don't leave me. / Look around and choose your own ground. / Long you live and high you fly / And smiles you'll give and tears you'll cry / And all you touch and all you see / Is all your life will ever be._

He stopped the Impala on the street. The leaves were bare this late in the season, but the neighborhood was still pretty even under gray skies. He watched Mary take it all in: the cherry trees that would flower up and down the block, the neat lawns, the gentle slope up to the house, the big gnarled tree out front, perfect for climbing. He saw it take hold of her, and he smiled.

"I put an offer on it today," he said. "Thanksgiving seemed like a good time for opening a new book and making a new life." Right on cue in the background, Aerosmith's _Dream On_ started to play, like a subliminal suggestion.

"Make it with me, Mary. The years, the laughter, the tears – I want to share them with you. Marry me. We'll make this our home, all good memories; a whole fresh start."

When she said, very simply, _yes_, the things he couldn't remember didn't matter any more.

* * *

_Author's Note: The end of the war in Vietnam for the U.S. wasn't the last chapter in the war itself; that came later, with the fall of Saigon in 1975. _

_I remember 1973 for Watergate, of course, and for __Roe v. Wade__, the launch of Skylab, and the spectacular Triple Crown win by Secretariat, the first horse to win all three races since 1948, years before I was even born._


	8. Aug 9, 1974: Along the Way

**Forty-Three Years in the Life, Chapter 8**

**August 9, 1974: Along The Way**

"It seems to me I could live my life / A lot better than I think I am / I guess that's why they call me / they call me the working man / They call me the working man / I guess that's what I am!"

John's voice carried up through the open window and Mary rolled her eyes in fond exasperation as she set down her pen. She couldn't understand how a man who loved music and could make engines sing nonetheless couldn't carry a tune in a bucket – or in John's case, a tool kit. Whatever key Rush was singing in, John was shoving a totally different one into the same lock with cheerful gusto while he tinkered with the Impala, his version of a relaxing Friday evening.

It was so _normal_, she loved it.

Normal had been her watchword for the year. Last year it had been fear and grief, and she still wasn't beyond that yet, but she desperately wanted to escape into normal. She wasn't a hunter anymore. Oh, she still kept a journal, but she tried to keep it to normal things, as if it were some ordinary woman's diary: recording a night out with John at the movies; remarking on the strangeness of Daylight Saving Time beginning in January instead of April and spending 45 minutes in a line waiting for gas, all courtesy of the gas crisis; commenting on the unbelievable Watergate craziness that had culminated today in Nixon's resignation taking effect and Gerald Ford being sworn in as President. Not exactly ordinary things, some of them, but not supernatural, either.

But no matter how hard she tried to dodge, the hunter world kept finding her out. Oh, she'd flat-out refused to cooperate with her uncle when he'd wanted to probe into her parents' deaths, and her insistence on staying entirely away from the family business had driven a wedge between her and her uncles, aunts, and cousins, but she had nightmares of yellow eyes in her father's face. Even knowing that demons had to play by the rules, she kept expecting and fearing that something bad would be around every corner. It had taken the better part of a year for her to stop salting her windows and thresholds, and only marrying John and moving in with him had brought that to a stop. But the demon was as good as his word, and nothing supernatural sought her out. She was left alone.

Still, she couldn't help but read the news with a hunter's eye. She'd been terrified back on April 3 and 4 when the super outbreak of tornadoes hit. Over 125 tornadoes in 24 hours, hitting 13 states and one province in Canada, killing over 300 people – nothing like it had ever happened before, and it smacked of the unnatural. It also didn't escape her that Kansas, despite its normal propensity for thunderstorms and tornadoes, was totally untouched by that outbreak, almost as if the storms intentionally had passed them by.

Almost as if a demon had designated her home state a safe zone.

And there were some other connections she couldn't escape, like the letter lying beside her journal on the desk. Even though it had no return address, she'd guessed who it was from even before she'd opened it by the Colorado postmark. She'd been careful to open it only when she was alone. Inside were clipped-out copies of three newspaper articles – one on the tornadoes, one on the on-air suicide of a television news announcer in Florida who shot herself in the head during a broadcast just last month, and one from some medical journal noting the progress of a huge smallpox epidemic in India. There was no letter; just a scrap of paper with a few words scrawled on it: _Sulfur found. Something's happening. Guard yourself._ There was no signature, but there didn't have to be.

She would never forget Daniel Elkins. He'd turned up a couple of days after her parents died, an average-looking man in ranching clothes with blue eyes, short reddish-blond hair, and a beard clipped short and neat. He'd nodded gravely at her from outside her door, and said, "I'm sorry for your loss. I was told you'd have my gun?"

She'd found it lying on the ground beside the Pinto after she'd persuaded John to go call for help. She'd known she'd have to clean up the site before the police got there, and besides – she wondered herself exactly what had happened. After the demon left, she'd seen Dean Van Halen – whatever his real name was – standing next to the gold Pinto with a long-barreled gun in his hands; then John had gasped back to life and drawn her attention. When she'd looked back again, she'd seen only the car, its lights on and engine running. She'd fed John a line about a stranger having attacked them. She apologized to Dean in her mind, but didn't think he'd hold it against her; he was a hunter, he knew the score. After John reluctantly agreed to leave her with her father's body to go find a telephone, she had walked over to the Pinto, and the antique revolver was the first thing she'd seen. As soon as she picked it up and saw the octagonal barrel and the Latin engraving, she knew what the gun had to be, and why Dean had brought it to the Walsh house back when the horror of the night had first begun. The story of the Colt had been one of her favorite bedtime tales ever since her parents had started teaching her to watch out for ghosts and goblins as well as human strangers. How and why Dean had just disappeared, and why he hadn't taken the gun with him, she didn't understand, but she'd hidden the gun well away from the road in the hollow of a tree. She'd retrieved it the second night afterward, too well aware of its value to be comfortable leaving it in the open, and hidden it in plain sight as just part of her Dad's gun collection.

She'd handed it to Elkins without a word, knowing without doubt that it belonged to him, and watched him check the chambers, counting bullets. When he raised an eyebrow at her, finding all the bullets still loaded, she shrugged.

"He couldn't get a shot," she'd said. "The demon left its hosts too fast."

He'd nodded again, understanding all she didn't say.

"I'm sorry. For you, and for him" He'd turned to leave, but then paused for a moment added, "I understand losing family. There's nothing harder. Tell him – no hard feelings."

She hadn't asked him what he meant, and he'd simply turned and left before she could tell him that she didn't think she'd see Dean again, not after the way he'd vanished, especially since she'd never look for him or any other hunter. She'd never contacted Elkins, but he'd sent notes twice now, both times to the right name at the right address, even though she'd moved twice and gotten married and changed her name in the interim.

She wouldn't answer this one, either.

Outside the window, the music changed to Bad Company, and she winced for more than just John's off-key rendition.

"Walkin' down this rocky road / Wondering where my life is leading / Rolling on to the bitter end. / Finding out along the way / What it takes to keep love living / You should know how it feels, my friend …"

The sound of John's voice changed; he was coming into the house, still singing. She tucked the letter away and closed her journal, and turned in time to see him sticking his head around the doorframe, pitching the lines directly to her.

"I'm ready for love / Oh, baby, I'm ready for love. / Ready for love / Oh, baby, I'm ready for love …" John let the music trail off suggestively, waggling his eyebrows, and grinned, wheedling. "Wanna go for a ride, pretty lady? My other baby is ready for company; the Impala is purrr-fect tonight. It's a great night for a cruise …"

Outside, the radio kept playing. _Now I'm on my feet again / Better things are bound to happen / All my dues surely must be paid / Many miles and many tears / Times were hard but now they're changing / You should know that I'm not afraid …_

She held out her hands and he pulled her to her feet, dancing her to the door. His arms were strong and his steps were sure; his dancing, unlike his singing, was like his mechanic's skills – polished and smooth. She followed his lead without effort, and it occurred to her that in his arms, even though he wasn't a hunter, even with all he didn't know, she wasn't afraid. She started singing with him as he swept her down the stairs to the car.

"I'm ready for love …"

* * *

_Author's Note: The unprecedented April 3, 1974 Super Outbreak of tornadoes was very real. It also wasn't remotely supernatural in origin, but I couldn't resist using it that way. For accounts of the real thing, check the website created to commemorate the storm (__). The on-air suicide of Christine Chubbuck, news announcer for WXLT-TV (now WWSB) in Sarasota, Florida, was also very real and made the national news, and I apologize for implying supernatural causes._

_The thing I remember best about 1974 was how fast the Nixon house of cards crumbled, and the surreal experience of seeing a U.S. President resign for the first and only time in history to avoid being impeached. I remember being royally pissed that Ford, in September, pardoned Nixon for any crimes he may have committed while in office. Others involved in Watergate were sentenced to prison, but Nixon walked. To me, that was just wrong._

_On the technological end of things, a Universal Product Code (UPC) was scanned for the very first time in June. They're ubiquitous now, but they weren't back then!_


	9. Apr 30, 1975: Shelter from the Storm

**Forty-Three Years In A Life, Chapter Nine**

**April 30, 1975: Shelter From The Storm**

John never talked about Vietnam.

He was like a lot of vets that way. Mary knew there had to be nightmare memories in his collection, but he never talked about them. On the rare occasions when he mentioned 'Nam at all, it was always just a funny anecdote about one of his friends or the hot and humid weather, or an acknowledgment that he'd missed something in Lawrence while he'd been in country. They were the same kinds of amusing, innocuous things he'd mentioned in his short letters home. When he came back, he'd slotted right back into his life as if he'd never left it, working in the garage his dad half-owned, as sunny, polite, cheerful, and ordinary as he'd ever been.

She knew façades better than most, though. And sometimes – rarely, but sometimes – she saw shadows lurking in his eyes when they heard stories on the evening news, or when certain songs came on the radio. He always put the darkness aside in short order, returning to normal life with a conscious, visible effort and a determined smile, shutting the box on his wartime memories and turning aside her concern with a hug and a kiss.

She'd tried to break through that wall, wanting to share everything about him, but that was the one and only thing he flatly refused to give her. Once and only once, he'd told her why: _If you weren't there, you wouldn't understand. You __couldn't__ understand. I can't talk about it. I won't. It's not something you should ever have to know. Don't ask. Please don't ever ask._

The irony, of course, was that she _had_ been there and she _could_ understand, if only she'd been willing to share her own nightmares. She thought back to angry ghosts, haunted farms and forests, nightmare things out of stories and legends that she'd seen walking in the real world – a demon with yellow eyes wearing her father's dead body and taunting her with being alone. Oh, she understood ugliness and evil and fear and anger and uncertainty and loss and guilt just as well as any soldier survivor, because she was one. And even though she'd left it, the battlefield was never further than her memories.

But she couldn't admit it any more than he could, and she hid her darkness just as adamantly as he did his. She realized somewhere along the way that he needed her to be untouched by the horror of his memories just as desperately and in the same way that she needed him not to be a hunter, to be innocent of the horror of the knowledge of the evil things that lurked just out of sight. He drew strength and purpose from protecting her from the evils he knew, and she did the same.

Until tonight.

The news had been building for months, but what showed on the screen was a shock nonetheless: the fall of Saigon. According to the reports, the last helicopters out from the roof of the U.S. embassy were packed to their load limits, and still there were desperate Vietnamese people screaming on the ground, climbing the fences and begging to be taken along. Listening to the evening news after dinner, John's jaw locked, and when he got up in coiled silence and left the room, she knew from other fights that it was because he was too angry to sit still, too furious to trust himself not to explode. She gave him thirty minutes before she turned off the television and went after him. She found him where she knew she would: in the garage under the hood of the Impala, Led Zeppelin's _In The Light_ playing on the cheap radio plugged into the wall, the volume a lot lower than usual. She perched on the corner of the crate supporting his toolbox and just watched his hands, and when they stilled as he eventually spoke without even looking at her, his voice ground out like gravel.

"They helped us. A lot of them helped us. And when the Vietcong find them out, they're all going to die." He shook his head. "Maybe we should never have been there in the first place, but the way we left? That was wrong. You don't leave a man behind, not ever – but in 'Nam, we left thousands. Men, women, children – they were Vietnamese, but they were our allies, our responsibility. And we left them. We were supposed to save them. What happens to them is our fault."

Greatly daring, she laid a gentle hand on the corded muscles of his rigid arm.

"You did what you could. You couldn't have done more."

He pulled away from her touch, folding in on himself.

"You don't know that. Hell – I don't know that." He fell silent again, and when he started speaking, she knew he wasn't seeing her or the car's engine or the cold spring rain falling in the twilight outside the open garage door.

"We never knew friend from foe. They all looked alike. North or south – they were the same people. They were all poor. They were all scared. They were all angry. They all wore the same clothes, spoke the same language. We killed men in the jungle who tried to kill us, and gave food and candy to village kids – and then a kid would walk up with a hand grenade and blow up your buddy, and an old man would save your squad with a warning about an ambush. None of it made any damn sense." He finally looked at her, and his eyes were dark. "We never talked about what we were doing there. We talked about home and training and girls and what we'd do when we got out. We never thought about what they'd do when we left. They weren't – real. Not to us, not when we weren't right there." He hefted the wrench in his hand, and then flung it sideways into the toolbox with an abrupt violence that made her jump. "Well, they're real now. When it's too late." His voice dripped bitterness.

She wanted to give him comfort and knew she would fail; she couldn't grant him absolution for his fault any more than he could have done for her, if he'd known about her guilt. How many nameless, faceless people had she failed, when she walked away from hunting? How many had she doomed with the choice she'd made? She'd never know if there were people she might have saved. All she could cling to was the one she knew she had.

Moving slowly, careful not to trigger the combat reflexes she knew he would have, she came up behind him and gently touched his shoulders, then slid her arms around his waist and rested her cheek against his back, feeling the steel-hard tension there.

"I'm sorry," she whispered, inadequate words but all she could offer. "I'm sorry."

After a while, she felt his shoulders slump, and then he turned in her arms and hugged her back, fierce and possessive and drowning. From the radio, acoustic guitar backed Bob Dylan's gravel voice of anger, grief, and loss. _But nothing really matters much, it's doom alone that counts / And the one-eyed undertaker, he blows a futile horn. / "Come in," she said, / "I'll give you shelter from the storm."_

She felt the chill rain in her heart, and clung to him with all her strength.

* * *

_Author's Note: The fall of Saigon was inevitable, but still appalling. That loss was more distant to me than another headline from 1975, though: Nov. 10 brought the wreck of the freighter SS Edmund Fitzgerald, later made famous in a song by Gordon Lightfoot. The Fitz used to winter in my hometown of Milwaukee; she was a familiar sight, and her sinking was a shock. My high point for the year was the first Apollo/Soyuz mission in July: the first time that the U.S. and Russia docked spacecraft in orbit. That made me hope we humans might yet learn to cooperate ..._


	10. June 17, 1976: Stars and Stripes Forever

**The Impala Chronicles (Forty-Some Years in a Life), Chapter 10**

**June 17, 1976: Stars And Stripes Forever**

Mary dipped her brush into the blue paint, consciously ignoring the Ramones' pounding "Blitzkrieg Bop" blaring from the shop radio as she worked on applying even color in straight lines around the white five-pointed star glistening on the garage wall. The official U.S. Bicentennial star emblem – a five-pointed white star inside red, white, and blue stars with rounded corners – was trademarked and could only be used under an expensive license, but nothing prevented an enterprising entrepreneur from using a more generic red, white, and blue star on his business to cash in on the current Bicentennial craze. She and John always needed extra money, and Mr. Woodson, who ran the garage where both John and his father worked, had been happy to pay when Mary offered her painting skills to turn the street-facing wall of his business into a patriotic ad.

She wondered what he would have thought if he knew what she was really doing. She wasn't thinking about art or advertising as she painted. Instead, she heard her mother's patient voice from a lesson long ago, when she was just a child.

"_The five-pointed star is a potent symbol even when it doesn't appear as a pentagram or pentacle, with connective lines inside it. It stands for the five senses, for the five wounds of Christ, and – from an even earlier time – for the four elements of earth, air, fire, and water being ruled over by spirit. It's no accident that the stars on the American flag are five-pointed ones, with the single point on top; there were hunters as well as Freemasons in the colonies who built protection and spiritual defense into every symbol of their new country."_

"_Were they Campbells?" she had asked, and Deanna had laughed._

"_Some of them. Campbells have always been hunters, all the way back into Scotland. They brought the lore with them to the new world right from the beginning. To hear your father tell it, Campbells won the revolution!" Her mother had hugged her, and her rich, happy voice had dropped as if to share a conspiratorial secret. "Just between us, though – I think he exaggerates a bit. Now, can you show me how well you can draw a pentagram?"_

She'd sketched the heraldic mullet design onto the garage wall with chalk, telling herself she'd made the star a pentagram purely out of habit because it was the best way she knew to make all the points equal. Even as she painted carefully over the chalk lines, however, she was conscious of them still being there under the paint, still providing their hidden protection to the building where John worked every day. She hadn't thought like a hunter for a year or more, feeling calmer and more removed from the past with every quiet month that had gone by, but news of the thunderstorms that had ravaged Iowa and spawned the F5 tornado that destroyed the town of Jordan just four days earlier had brought it all raging back. The freak storms had triggered every hunter instinct she possessed, ringing alarms her mother and father had drilled into her with the knowledge that supernatural activity often played hob with the weather. Frustrated and hating feeling helpless, she'd jumped at the excuse of earning a bit of extra cash by putting art on the garage. Seeing the results of her work taking on almost finished form brought unexpected peace.

The familiar growl of the Impala's engine announced John's return before the car itself appeared from around the corner. "Witchy Woman" poured from the car's open windows to collide with the garage radio's rendition of CCR's "I Put A Spell On You." Given what she was doing, she winced as much for the irony as for the cacophony, but she smiled in answer to John's wave as he pulled past her into the driveway and killed the Eagles with the ignition.

"It looks great, honey!" He stopped to admire the paint job, then unlocked the trunk and started wrestling out the boxes of specialty auto parts he'd picked up from the dealer two towns over. She hid her own indulgent smile as she turned back to the wall to apply the last few finishing strokes to her work. John's pride in his car showed in his refusal to drive the garage van on any pickup that could possibly fit into the Impala's trunk. She thought wryly that he would never have felt that way about the old VW bus she'd tried to get him to buy. His persistent joy in the car had gradually won her over from her initial instant dislike of its foreboding, hunter-like black power. To her own mild surprise, she realized she now found it solid and reassuring rather than dark and threatening.

And no doubt those thunderstorms were nothing more than thunderstorms, and the star she had painted on the wall needed to be nothing more than a star.

But it hurt nothing for the Impala to have raw power under its polished hood and capacious room in its trunk, and for the bold American star to contain a pentagram's protection.

* * *

_In 1976, I graduated from college and started law school. In between, one of my greatest joys was attending Third Century America, NASA's celebratory exposition on the grounds of the Vehicle Assembly Building (VAB) at Kennedy Space Center on Cape Canaveral in Florida. The biggest Bicentennial star emblem anywhere was painted on the side of the VAB beside the biggest U.S. flag ever; they remained there until 1998, when the NASA emblem replaced the star. You could walk right into the VAB (which is so big that it has its own weather – inside!), and there were technology exhibits in a whole cluster of geodesic domes beside the VAB. Best of all, however, was the Launch Control center, where they reset all the monitors and screens to replay the launch of Apollo 11 in real time. Watching and hearing the heavy steel blast shields close over the plate glass windows facing toward the empty launch pads, and then reliving July 1969 in the countdown and the changing computer readouts, I got goosebumps on my arms. The building trembled even with just the recorded power of the massive Saturn V launch. I will never forget that; it's a memory I treasure that can never be repeated, because all the old computers and monitors were pulled out and replaced with newer technology – several times over by now. And now we're once again going to be without manned launch capability when the Space Shuttle program ends. I grieve. I always wanted to go to space; back in 1976, I thought we'd be a hell of a lot closer by now to me realizing that dream._

_1976 was also the year of the very first commercial Cray supercomputer, and the creation of Apple by Steve Jobs. And I'll never forget the first commercial flight of the supersonic Concorde jet, either – another futuristic dream we've lost since then. Finally, 1976 was the year Kansas released "Carry On Wayward Son" as the lead tune on their album "Leftoverture." Alas for me wishing to use it in this summer story, the album wasn't released until October._

_And did you know that in heraldry, a pentagram is a mullet? Maybe there was a mystical reason for Dean's taste in music and Ash's taste in hairstyles!_


End file.
